Comcast’s Real Repairman

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David Cohen, left, Comcast’s executive vice president, testified this month at a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on the Comcast-Time Warner Cable merger. He also led the effort to win F.C.C. support for Comcast’s acquisition of NBC Universal. At center is Arthur Minson, chief financial officer for Time Warner Cable.CreditCreditJonathan Ernst/Reuters

By Michael Sokolove

April 19, 2014

One morning late last month, David L. Cohen took a seat in a conference room atop Comcast’s corporate headquarters in Philadelphia, the tallest building in the city, and was handed a binder of architectural drawings. The plans were for a second Comcast skyscraper, taller than the first, because the growing company needs more space.

Mr. Cohen, 59, Comcast’s executive vice president, studied the drawings and directed a series of questions toward a video screen that connected him to a representative of the developer and a Comcast executive in New York. On what floor should the cafeteria go? How many cars could be parked in a small underground garage, and had anyone done a traffic study of the narrow city street where the garage would exit? Since the new building is intended for engineers and other high-tech workers, would the ratio of square footage per employee be similar to that of the Comcast facility in Silicon Valley?

Mr. Cohen is well known in Philadelphia from his time as chief of staff to former Mayor Edward G. Rendell in the 1990s, a six-year tenure that established his reputation as a master of big-picture strategy, fine detail and just about everything in between.

“Whatever the issue is, David learns more about it than anyone, and he can keep it all in his head,” Mr. Rendell says. “With me, he knew all about municipal pensions, and he knew about picking up trash — I mean the actual routes of the garbage trucks.”

At Comcast, Mr. Cohen has extended his range of competencies by transforming himself into a supremely well-connected political player. President Obama, at Mr. Cohen’s home in Philadelphia in 2013 to raise money for Democratic Senate candidates, joked, “I have been here so much, the only thing I haven’t done in this house is have Seder dinner.”

Mr. Cohen oversees Comcast’s robust lobbying operation and sets the strategies to shepherd its acquisitions past antitrust questions and other regulatory concerns. It’s a big job — and one that would fully occupy almost anyone else — because Comcast’s appetite for expansion is large, and it needs to be fed with a frequency that some find alarming.

Founded by Ralph J. Roberts in 1963, Comcast began as a cable television provider in Tupelo, Miss., with 1,200 customers. For many years it grew like a traditional cable company — by stringing wire and signing up subscribers. (At 94, Mr. Roberts serves as chairman emeritus and still comes into the office several times a week.) Mr. Cohen was hired in 2002 by Brian L. Roberts, the chief executive and a son of the founder, after the company agreed to acquire AT&T’s broadband unit but before the transaction won approval from regulators.

Seven years later, Mr. Cohen led the effort to win support at the Federal Communications Commission for another huge merger — Comcast’s deal to acquire NBC Universal, which put the company in control of a television network and made it a player, for the first time, in content.

Comcast is already the nation’s largest cable and broadband provider. Its February announcement of a $45 billion deal to acquire Time Warner Cable — which is No. 2 in cable and No. 3 in Internet — cast Mr. Cohen, once again, as the point man in a high-stakes regulatory fight. It was Mr. Cohen, not Mr. Roberts, who testified this month when the Senate Judiciary Committee held a hearing on the transaction. But campaigning for the merger will not consume all of his time because, well, nothing does. Just about anything of consequence that occurs within Comcast gets at least some of his attention.

In the tempest late last year over the lack of a black female cast member on “Saturday Night Live,” for example, Mr. Cohen advised in his role as company wise man — or, as he has been called, consigliere to Mr. Roberts. “I received a lot of the calls,” Mr. Cohen says. “We devised what we were going to say. We ended up brokering a meeting between Lorne Michaels” — the show’s longtime producer — “and some of the advocacy groups, which he was good enough to take. He was terrific about it. He didn’t give any promises, but he said: ‘We’ve had diverse talent. We have diverse guests. I’m not happy about where we are right now, either.’ They backed off for a couple of months, and he hired someone.”

More recently, Mr. Cohen got involved in a minor issue concerning a television program — complaints by some viewers that “Friday Night Tykes,” a reality show about youth football on the Esquire Network (partly owned by NBC Universal), was glorifying unsafe play. Perhaps it would not otherwise have risen to Mr. Cohen’s level, but he is the company’s political weather vane, and it certainly mattered to him that among those offended by “Friday Night Tykes” was Senator Richard J. Durbin of Illinois, the Senate’s second-ranking Democrat. “There was a little bit of an issue with the show, and an issue with Dick Durbin,” is how Mr. Cohen puts it. He requested DVDs, watched a couple of episodes at home and concluded that there was “one bad scene” but that the program largely condemned the behaviors its critics said it was extolling.

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Mr. Cohen, second from right, at a 2011 benefit in Philadelphia for the U.S.C. Shoah Foundation Institute. Others who attended included Brian Roberts, third from right, Comcast’s chief executive; Edward Rendell, third from left, former governor of Pennsylvania; and the filmmaker Steven Spielberg, center.CreditJemal Countess/Getty Images

Mr. Cohen has, as well, gotten into the weeds of Comcast’s cable and broadband customer service — a fraught subject since surveys have consistently shown that the industry in general, and Comcast in particular, are held in low regard by consumers. He has even gone on talk radio shows in Philadelphia to take calls from customers, a duty that few executives at his pay grade — Mr. Cohen pulled in just short of $30 million in compensation over the last two years — would seek.

“I point out we get over 300 million service calls a year,” he says. “A million a day. So if we do a great job on 99 percent of them, then we are going to have three million people” who are angry — “and we do a great job on way more than 99 percent.”

Mr. Cohen says he believes that Comcast has improved its service, an opinion informed by the tenor of his talk radio appearances. Ninety percent of the callers used to complain, but now he estimates that as many as a third have good things to say about a home service call. “They’ll say, ‘He was on time. He was polite. Before he came in my house, he put bootees on his shoes to make sure he didn’t track in dirt,’ which, by the way, is part of our protocol.”

A Master of Preparation

Mr. Cohen grew up in Highland Park, N.J., and by his own account was a serious young man from an early age. At 3, he was already saying he wanted to be a lawyer.

As a freshman at Swarthmore College, he knocked at the dorm room of David G. Bradley, now chairman of Atlantic Media, which publishes The Atlantic Monthly and several other publications. Mr. Bradley, a junior, was running for vice president of the student body. “He said he wanted to be my staff aide,” Mr. Bradley says. “I don’t think I knew what that meant, but we began to work together.”

As part of the campaign, Mr. Bradley had to prepare a talk on the state of the student body. “David said he would work on that, and he produced about 300 pages of interview notes and executive notes. I don’t think anyone had ever seen anything like that before.”

Mr. Cohen, who has remained close to Mr. Bradley, smiles when reminded of the long-ago campaign. “That’s just my view of the world,” he says. “Always be more prepared than anyone else, because there’s a huge advantage to knowing everything that might be asked and having given at least some thought to the answer.”

In some ways, Mr. Cohen’s role at Comcast is a reprise of his job with Mr. Rendell: the indispensable man, working across dizzyingly disparate subject areas. But there are significant differences. Philadelphia was in such desperate financial straits back then that Buzz Bissinger titled his book about Mr. Rendell’s first term “A Prayer for the City.” Comcast, on the other hand, is a big, healthy, aggressive entity — one its critics view as being on a triumphant march across America.

Brian Roberts is widely considered Comcast’s visionary, the man who saw that a cable company could grow into an empire that competes across multiple arenas. In a telephone interview, he praised Mr. Cohen’s “extraordinary level of detail, his preparation, his ability to galvanize a team.” All of it, he said, adds up to his “knowing how to win.”

The purchase of Time Warner Cable will be reviewed by the Justice Department for antitrust concerns, as well as by the F.C.C. and by regulators in some states. The process is expected to extend for many months. If the merger goes through, the combined company will operate in 43 of the nation’s 50 biggest metropolitan markets and serve about 30 million households and businesses.

Comcast views itself as a communications and technology company. When its executives talk about their competitors, they tick off the names of bigger, global corporations — Apple and Google, for example. They argue that Comcast must continue to become bigger to have the scale to innovate and compete.

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Mr. Cohen in a meeting at Comcast’s headquarters.CreditTracie Van Auken for The New York Times

Mr. Cohen approaches his advocacy for Comcast’s transactions like the litigator he once was. “It’s the same way you build a case. You understand all the facts down to a minute level,” he says. “And then you pull the lens back so everyone else can understand it, and organize the advocacy in a way that is compelling and persuasive.”

He makes several points about the merger with Time Warner Cable: The two companies do not compete in the same cable markets, so the deal in his view will have no impact on consumers. And both companies have been losing cable subscribers, about a million combined just in 2013 — perhaps most of them “cord-cutters” who watch television without cable. “If we’re a monopoly, we are the dumbest monopoly that has ever existed on the face of this earth,” he says.

Of course, Comcast has been steadily gaining broadband customers — from fewer than seven million in 2004 to more than 20 million in 2013. It’s a point that Mr. Cohen, with a lawyer’s gift for emphasizing only the facts in his favor, does not highlight, and broadband, much more than cable, is likely to be the focus of regulators. “I think almost everyone uses the facts that help them,” he says.

Michael Copps, a former commissioner on the F.C.C., now serves as the special adviser to Common Cause’s Media and Democracy Reform Initiative. He says of Mr. Cohen: “He is a delightful person, very professional in going about his work. But people also recognize how close he is personally to people in positions of great power, from the president on down. Those kinds of connections that he and his company have cultivated translate into a lot of credibility in Washington.”

Mr. Copps was the commission’s lone dissenting vote on Comcast’s merger with NBC Universal, and he opposes the merger with Time Warner Cable: “This is about the whole future of broadband, which a lot of people thought would be exempt from the consolidation that was visited upon radio and TV.”

Mr. Cohen contends that Comcast has no incentive to use its dominant position in broadband to “throttle” traffic or to make it more difficult for so-called edge providers like Netflix or Hulu to reach their audiences. “The existence of those edge providers is exactly what enables us to sell more broadband and make more money,” he says.

He has walked a fine line as to whether Comcast will charge consumers more for this service. He says prices may continue to rise but not because of anything in this particular transaction.

A Political Money Raiser

When Mr. Cohen joined Comcast, its Washington office consisted of one professional and an administrative assistant. It now has about 40 people working in a building one block from the Capitol. Among them is Meredith Attwell Baker, who left her post as an F.C.C. commissioner to take a job with Comcast just six months after she had voted in favor of the company’s merger with NBC Universal.

“The game is that money talks,” says Kathy Kiely, managing editor of the Sunlight Foundation, which tracks the influence of political giving on government policy. “David Cohen is one of those folks who has made an art form out of it. If you raise money for politicians, you are trying to exercise and access influence, and he does it very well.”

Mr. Cohen’s political connections, which he began building in his years with Mr. Rendell, allow him to make his case not just in hearing rooms but also in more private settings.

“So I go to see Senator Booker,” he says at one point, talking about Cory Booker, the Democratic former mayor of Newark. “I’ve known him since before he was mayor.” He refers to John Hickenlooper, the Colorado governor, a Democrat, as “another friend of mine.” He says Eric Cantor, the Republican House majority leader, “has become a very good personal friend.”

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Senator Al Franken has been one of Comcast’s most persistent critics.CreditChris Kleponis/Getty Images

Mr. Cohen estimates that since he joined Comcast, he and his wife, Rhonda, have made personal contributions to political candidates that total in “the high six figures, or maybe low seven figures. It’s somewhere in that universe.” The three fund-raisers he hosted for President Obama in Philadelphia, two of them at his house, raised more than $10 million.

Mr. Cohen is widely considered affable and patient in negotiations, not one to personalize business conflicts. But he does broadly categorize those who oppose Comcast interests: “You can’t let yourself be influenced by the really fringe consumer progressive organizations who in every single transaction that has occurred in the media space wail that the sky is going to fall and the world is going to end as we know it.”

Senator Al Franken has been one of Comcast’s most persistent critics, and he was the most aggressive questioner at the recent Judiciary Committee hearing. “A smart guy” with “a pathological bias” is how Mr. Cohen described Mr. Franken several weeks before that hearing, at a forum at the University of Pennsylvania’s School of Law. (Senator Franken says he opposes the deal because he thinks it will be bad for consumers.)

Mr. Cohen is not registered as a lobbyist — the rules require it only for those who spend at least 20 percent of their time lobbying — and he bristles when he is referred to as one. Because of his association with Mr. Rendell, who also served two terms as Pennsylvania’s governor, and now President Obama, many assume he is a straight-down-the-line Democrat. He says that was never the case — he grew up with Republican parents and was one of what he believes to have been four Republican students at Swarthmore during his time there — but the rightward drift of the party drove him away, and for many years the bulk of his giving was to Democrats.

His giving and fund-raising on behalf of candidates is now split more evenly, though it still tilts toward Democrats. (The same is true of the money that Comcast gives through its political action committee — as well as of the political contributions made by most of its top executives, including Mr. Roberts.)

“My priorities in political giving are Comcast priorities,” Mr. Cohen says. “I don’t kid myself. My goals are to support the interests of the company.”

“That makes me a very purple person, and Rhonda as well,” he says. “Rhonda, left to her own devices, would give to many fewer Republicans than I would.”

Mr. Cohen says he understands the criticism that he has access most citizens do not. “But I also don’t believe in unilateral disarmament,” he says. “We have a lot of opponents, a lot of competitors. They are all equally involved in the political process.”

When Mr. Cohen hosted a fund-raiser at his home in the Mount Airy section of Philadelphia last year for Gov. Tom Corbett of Pennsylvania, a Republican, it was front-page news in The Philadelphia Inquirer. At the University of Pennsylvania law forum, a student asked how he could support a candidate who did not have “a liberal, progressive bone in his body.”

“So let me guess,” said Mr. Cohen, who is chairman of the university’s board of trustees. “You’re not a member of Penn Republicans?”

He then defended the governor as an honorable and compassionate man, but he said the fund-raiser did not necessarily confer his support. He said he didn’t yet know whom he would vote for. “We have a bunch of Democrats running for governor,” he said. “And they’re all my friends, too.”